It’s been waaaaaaaaay to long since I’ve posted. A lot’s happened since then. Let me recap:

I took over as CEO of HomeFinder.com

We shut down MoverWebsites.com

At HomeFinder, we launched an internal startup called MovingCompanyReviews.com

I left HomeFinder.com to be CEO of EarthClassMail.com in 2015

I ended up buying MovingCompanyReviews.com from HomeFinder in 2016

Phew! I am happy to report that MovingCompanyReviews.com is alive and well, and doing better than ever. It’s a really great site to find mover – we verify every review with a moving receipt (called a bill of lading), so consumers can trust the reviews they read on site. For example, check out our Boise, ID movers. We don’t have a ton of reviews there yet, but Big Boy Movers is a quality company that treats people right.

We’ve got some great features coming out – including giving consumers free pizza on their move days. Who doesn’t love free pizza?

Like all of our moving sites, visitors can get an instant online estimate without having to give up personal information. We think that’s a pretty cool feature, hopefully it’s one that drives more business.

I am playing around with a new site that helps people find horses for sale, aptly named www.FindHorsesForSale.net. I wanted to provide searchers some background on the particular horse breed they were looking at, so I decided to provide the first few paragraphs from the wikipedia page for that horse breed, and then link off to the full wikipedia page. For example, see the content on the lower left of the paso fino horses for sale page.

After some searching around, I found the perfect tool – the wikipedia-client gem on github. As Judge Smails from Caddy Shack would say, “top notch, top notch!”

I stumbled across this today after hacking around for hours trying to figure out import hundreds of thousands of records into a sqlite database in minutes – https://github.com/zdennis/activerecord-import. Super simple, and pure awesome. Works for sqlite, postgres, and mysql.

Been hacking away the last couple weeks building an online price comparison search for moving box kits. Check it out at www.MovingBoxSearch.com, the design has a ways to go, and we still have to add a bunch of providers, but it’s getting there.

We did manage to do one neat thing, we’ll buy $5 worth of Starbucks coffee for anyone who buys moving boxes through us. Within an hour or two of buying his/her boxes, the person will get an e-giftcard in their email inbox from Starbucks for $5. Who couldn’t use a little coffee on their move day?

Joe starts his lesson. AccentTraining.net calls his phone, and has him record a couple of sentences that we pull from a recent newspaper article.

Once Joe is happy with his recording, we have 5 native US speakers listen to his recording, transcribe it, and rate his accent.- Here’s the cool part

Each US speaker also records himself/herself recording the same sentences, so Joe can compare his accent to to real native speakers speaking the same words

Example accent rating, with recordings

Here’s another cool (and geeky) part – we have Twilio transcribe Joe’s recording, and each US speaker’s recording, so Joe can measure how well automated translation understands his american accent, vs. US speakers

Example accent rating transcription

We notify Joe when the US speakers submit their ratings, and present him with the cornucopia of information mentioned above.

Why start such a service? Simple. I am a huge geek, and wanted to see if it could be done. Ok, that’s not the real reason, but I did enjoy the challenge.

The real reason arose when a good friend, who grew up in India, and I were talking about business ideas awhile back. He wanted to a startup to help Indian students get accepted to US colleges, and the conversation meandered into a discussion of how poor many students’ American accents were. Fresh off of building a website usability testing service based on Mechanical Turk (EasyUsability.com), the thought popped in my head that an accent rating and training service was a perfect use of the turk. Who better than everyday American residents to help people with their American accents?

Now you’re probably muttering to yourself, “that’s mildly interesting, but who’s going to pay money for this?” Great question. I am not exactly sure yet, but here are my initial thoughts:

students wanting to get into US colleges

students at US colleges who want to get a job here

Foreign born people in the US who want to do better at work, school, whatever

Workers on outsourcing services like elance.com, oDesk.com, etc.

People visiting the US on vacation

the ~600,000 Indian or Philippine residents who work in call centers serving US markets

So who knows where it will go from here, but we’ll see. Stay tuned for more posts on how things go!

HomeFinder.com (my day job), is hiring a couple software developers, a QA manager, and an Agile Technical Analyst. It’s a great place to work, right in downtown Chicago, full of fun, bright people. Developers get to use the latest and greatest web app technology (jquery, javascript, rest, mongodb, solr, php, etc.), get to do 3 day hackathons every month, and get to build and ship cool stuff. Check out the links below..